Too woke? Marco Rubio had some tough words for U.S. foreign assistance — which has been all but completely dissolved during his short tenure as secretary of state — on a podcast hosted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s son: Triggered with Don Jr.
“We turned [foreign aid] into *a tool to export our domestic policies of the far left*,” Rubio said, according to a transcript <https://t.devex.com/Njg1LUtCTC03NjUAAAGZvljESP_ucbOSHtc22RhbT9TH-gZoyVUaT9-A8yMBovQkIwvC0Zf0rPRLR5YmXiy86p8nBrs=> published by the State Department on Tuesday. “We began to use foreign aid not as a way to make America stronger, safer, more prosperous, but as a way to impose – impose – the domestic political agenda of the left onto foreign countries. And it became a vehicle for that.” *Foreign aid had turned into “cultural imperialism,”* Rubio said, in part because “USAID was separate from the State Department” and “did whatever they wanted.” He spoke about the “foreign aid industrial complex,” with organizations “raking in hundreds of millions of dollars” to run programs on behalf of the U.S. government. And he talked about how aid was “indoctrinating people on the social priorities of the far left in the United States.” “So we’re going to realign foreign aid,” Rubio told Donald Trump Jr. “We’re actually going to be helping countries with what they generally need.” *That includes security assistance*, Rubio said, and helping countries “build up police departments and security forces” so they can take on gang violence. *“The best foreign aid is foreign aid that ultimately ends* because it’s successful, because you go in, you help somebody, they build up their capacity, and now they can handle it themselves, and they don’t need foreign aid anymore.”
